February 07, 2011

And The Sun Rises In The East

SAN ANTONIO — Some of the world’s pre-eminent experts on bias discovered an unexpected form of it at their annual meeting.

Discrimination is always high on the agenda at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology’s conference, where psychologists discuss their research on racial prejudice, homophobia, sexism, stereotype threat and unconscious bias against minorities. But the most talked-about speech at this year’s meeting, which ended Jan. 30, involved a new “outgroup.”

It was identified by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia who studies the intuitive foundations of morality and ideology. He polled his audience at the San Antonio Convention Center, starting by asking how many considered themselves politically liberal. A sea of hands appeared, and Dr. Haidt estimated that liberals made up 80 percent of the 1,000 psychologists in the ballroom. When he asked for centrists and libertarians, he spotted fewer than three dozen hands. And then, when he asked for conservatives, he counted a grand total of three.

“This is a statistically impossible lack of diversity,” Dr. Haidt concluded, noting polls showing that 40 percent of Americans are conservative and 20 percent are liberal. In his speech and in an interview, Dr. Haidt argued that social psychologists are a “tribal-moral community” united by “sacred values” that hinder research and damage their credibility — and blind them to the hostile climate they’ve created for non-liberals.

“Anywhere in the world that social psychologists see women or minorities underrepresented by a factor of two or three, our minds jump to discrimination as the explanation,” said Dr. Haidt, who called himself a longtime liberal turned centrist. “But when we find out that conservatives are underrepresented among us by a factor of more than 100, suddenly everyone finds it quite easy to generate alternate explanations.”

The obvious alternative - being black or female is a fact of biology; conservatism is a belief set, and it is wrong.

OK, the notion that either conservatism or libealism can be objectively verified strikes me as an absurdly long stretch, but I am not an earnest lib professor rationalizing my close-mindedness.

Back to the Times:

The fields of psychology, sociology and anthropology have long attracted liberals, but they became more exclusive after the 1960s, according to Dr. Haidt. “The fight for civil rights and against racism became the sacred cause unifying the left throughout American society, and within the academy,” he said, arguing that this shared morality both “binds and blinds.”

“If a group circles around sacred values, they will evolve into a tribal-moral community,” he said. “They’ll embrace science whenever it supports their sacred values, but they’ll ditch it or distort it as soon as it threatens a sacred value.” It’s easy for social scientists to observe this process in other communities, like the fundamentalist Christians who embrace “intelligent design” while rejecting Darwinism. But academics can be selective, too, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan found in 1965 when he warned about the rise of unmarried parenthood and welfare dependency among blacks — violating the taboo against criticizing victims of racism.

“Moynihan was shunned by many of his colleagues at Harvard as racist,” Dr. Haidt said. “Open-minded inquiry into the problems of the black family was shut down for decades, precisely the decades in which it was most urgently needed. Only in the last few years have liberal sociologists begun to acknowledge that Moynihan was right all along.”

Similarly, Larry Summers, then president of Harvard, was ostracized in 2005 for wondering publicly whether the preponderance of male professors in some top math and science departments might be due partly to the larger variance in I.Q. scores among men (meaning there are more men at the very high and very low ends). “This was not a permissible hypothesis,” Dr. Haidt said. “It blamed the victims rather than the powerful. The outrage ultimately led to his resignation. We psychologists should have been outraged by the outrage. We should have defended his right to think freely.”

The Social Intuitionist Model has been extended into "Moral Foundations Theory," an account of how five innate psychological systems form the foundation of “intuitive ethics,” but each culture constructs its own sets of virtues on top of these foundations. The current American culture war can be seen as arising from the fact that Liberals try to create a morality using only the Harm/Care and Fairness/Reciprocity modules; conservatives, especially religious conservatives, use all five modules, including Ingroup/Loyalty, Authority/Respect, and Purity/Sanctity. (The theory owes a great deal to Richard Shweder's account of the "Big 3" moral ethics: Autonomy, Community, and Divinity). To see how I have applied moral psychology to the study of politics, click here.

And his WSJ essay on the motivations of the Tea Partiers is fascinating. Briefly, conservatives think that what goes around ought to come around; liberals think goverment should stand at the ready to be sure it doesn't:

The rank-and-file tea partiers think that liberals turned America upside down in the 1960s and 1970s, and they want to reverse many of those changes. They are patriotic and religious, and they want to see those values woven into their children's education. Above all, they want to live in a country in which hard work and personal responsibility pay off and laziness, cheating and irresponsibility bring people to ruin. Give them liberty, sure, but more than that: Give them karma.

TM, You always find the most stimulating stuff to discuss! Wow..this is really interesting.

You mean all those UCal Berkeley social studies that find that conservatives are stupid, racist pigs just might be the result of bias.
Well, whoever would have thought it?(It's actually great to see that someone inside finally is blowing a whistle.)

TM:
This is a fascinating topic and as a former guidance counselor I can totally relate to that groupthink among fellow counselors.I'm glad someone is looking outside of the liberal bubble and noticing all the valuable people outside that have so much to contribute to the discussion.

Above all, they want to live in a country in which hard work and personal responsibility pay off and laziness, cheating and irresponsibility bring people to ruin. Give them liberty, sure, but more than that: Give them karma justice.

macphisto -- he's been around for a while. The "conservatives use all five aspects of morality" stuff came out a year or two ago. They haven't destroyed him, yet. They haven't taken his research to heart, either.

He is going to be especially hated, because he has lib approved credentials. Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy, magna cum laude, 1985, Yale. Masters in Psychology, 1988, UPenn. PhD in Psychology, UPenn, 1992.

It's not just that they discriminate against conservative applicants. Too few conservatives apply for that to be the explanation. The point is that social sciences attract Marxists in hoards.

Marxism is essentially the view that a mechanistic social science can provide a reductive and eliminativist explanation of moral and political phenomena wherein all social forces drive toward a communist society. The bookish pinko learns this and wants to be on the team of experts laying out this mechanistic pathway. In this he has his only chance at having a share of power, since his political and business prowess are nil.

By the same token, conservatives who might be interested in social science are repelled from it because it involves drowning in a sea of pinko colleagues, professors and fellow students and being forced to imbibe their swill.

The explanation is that hoards of pinkos go into these fields for ideological reasons. That's why there are hoards of pinkos in these fields.

Think of a psychologist who tells you, "You're unhappy because you don't take responsibility for yourself. You are not conscientious in your dealings with others. You are lazy. These are the causes of your unhappiness. Your character vices are the explanation for your unhappiness."

A parent or friend could tell you that. You don't need a shrink. No power accrues to the one telling you that. Psychology is more attractive to those who seek power the more it offers technical, mechanistic explanation of behavior. The more psychology offers such explanations, the more pinkos it attracts. These pinkos develop these mechanistic explanations and cause them to proliferate, attractive more pinkos to the field.

A conservative might wish to become a shrink, but he will wield the moral diagnoses where they are far superior to the mechanistic ones. This will make it difficult for him to go with the flow in the field. He will drop out.

"Marxism is essentially the view that a mechanistic social science. . ."

And yet, if you can believe it, Marx was a romantic. He used the vocabulary of science without the method. His evidence supporting his claims was shoddy. Basically, Marx was pissed that his father made him study law so he could support himself when he was interested in other things. The damned capitalism forced him to consider work where he could be paid when life should have let him do whatever his little heart wanted.

Think of a psychologist who tells you, "You're unhappy because you don't take responsibility for yourself. You are not conscientious in your dealings with others. You are lazy. These are the causes of your unhappiness. Your character vices are the explanation for your unhappiness."

Jim Ryan, the odds of a psychologist actually telling you that are like 1000-1. As established above, they're almost all liberals, and their schooling does not allow for outdated concepts like "character vices."

I began studying anthropology somewhere @ the age of 8 or 10 or so when I loved National Geographic for both the pictures and articles. I thought learning about different cultures was one of the coolest things in the world.

But even at an early age I realized there was some kind of BS going on when the second most popular anthropologist, Margaret Mead, made her career basically redefining western sexuality by publishing extensively on clan practices in the South Pacific that had zero relevance.

Whether it was herself and her agenda or simply a media or certain mindset who glommed onto her work and wanted to tear down Western Civ., suddenly comparative anthropology was the thing. It was an excuse for a political agenda.

Leakey was a hero. His work at Olduvai Gorge was amazing and germane and very well grounded. Studying Congolese tribes or why ancient Mesoamerican cultures failed or even the mordant link between say, the Aztecs and the modern relationship with death and the afterworld in Mexico is fascinating stuff.

But a lot of the crap was used to justify the I'm okay/You're okay anything goes culture we have today.And so much of the research today is so badly distorted it is directly responsible for many of our society's ills.

Where are the studies of American inner city life that might support Moynihan's assertions in 1965? Our inner cities are anthropological no go zones because of political correctness.

In once sense anthropology is one of the most important disciplines. As it stands today it's a joke.

See LUN for an interesting essay asserting that Haidt views modern biological research as supporting the conservative view of spontaneous social orders developing. I am skeptical of attempts to apply modern scientific research to issues of ethics, so I am reluctant to cite Haidt in support of my view that Hayek's Road to Serfdom was a masterpiece of human psychology and ethics (Hayek examined how body politics flourished by establishing a framework of rules that left individuals wide discretion in making their own plans). However, I do find it interesting that Haidt takes modern biological research and comes to conclusions about their import to ethics that, to put it mildly, differ from the prog view of the import of science for ethics.

Some psychologists do tell it straight. I know some, and I remember Sid Caesar had a fit because when he went to a shrink to talk about his alcohol problem, the doctor said ," Then just stop drinking."

But even at an early age I realized there was some kind of BS going on when the second most popular anthropologist, Margaret Mead, made her career basically redefining western sexuality by publishing extensively on clan practices in the South Pacific that had zero relevance.

Mead was a joke in the cultures she studied - literally. Her subjects would give her elaborate false answers for kicks, and she fell for all of it. She got punked, and yet her "research" is still taken at face value by idiots and considered to be "highly influential."

For the most part, busybodies with low self-esteem love being associated with modern socialistic endeavors. They crave self identification and authority over others and use their psychiatric 'book-knowledge' to define personality disorders, complexes and phobias, etc., that everyone else has--but of course, not them. What better way to feel superior and in control over their fellow man?

They search, study and opine endlessly for answers to humanity's mental and emotional quandaries but forget or ignore the fact, that the Bible explains all the causes and all the cures, and even gives examples for those whom the world considers "hopeless". Most of what ails man has a common root that most conservatives recognize instantly, but using the word "sin" in modern psychology parlance is verboten.

A personal anecdote - my best friend is a straight-up liberal whose career is in behavioral genetics, which involves much work in IQ testing and is often vilified by the left. She knows that she and her colleagues are involved in potential career-killing work (because of the political implications). She is an admirer of Charles Murray's research. And yet, she can't/won't draw the larger conclusions about the political culture that are so obvious to those of us on the politically incorrect side of the spectrum.

If you can't win over through reason someone who knows all the facts and yet clings emotionally to liberal/left ideology, it's pretty hopeless.

I remember all the different theories and how feelings were always given top priority. Later on I learned especially with adolescents more directive therapy and guidance was needed. Like sit in my office and do your homework or Let's strategize how you are going to approach that particular teacher. Personal responsibility is the key to good self esteem and self-image.

DoT, a conservative might find mechanistic explanations of behavior in anthropology, psychology, sociology and political science interesting. For instance, he may be an anthropologist who thinks the availability of water in a region plays an interesting role in the local culture. Or he may be a psychologist who thinks parental neglect causes certain psychological problems in the grown child. But he doesn't believe these explanations have anything to do with communism, or that morality is merely an epiphenomenon of economic forces, or that moral, non-mechanistic explanations of behavior are more superficial than the mechanistic explanations. Unfortunately, he will be forced to master the pinko stuff for every final exam in grad school. So, he will drop out.

In the essay I posted above, it is asserted that Haidt rejected the Platonic view of human psychology (which may be summarized as follows: the thinking part of us enlists the spirited part to control the hydra of appetites) and adopted the more modern view which might be summarized as follows: humans are rationalizing, not rational creatures (my wording, but I think it summarizes what is asserted to be Haidt's view). However, I don't recall anywhere in the Platonic dialogues that Plato supports the proposition that most human operate by having our thinking part enlist out spirited part to control our appetites, but that an individual who achieved this was a just individual. I think the Platonic dialogues are quite
consistent with the view that Plato probably viewed most humans as rationalizing, not rational creatures. I think his cave and divided line
passages support the view that Plato understood the challenges faced by an individual whose aim is to be guided by reason.

It is ironic that Haidt is viewed as being more supportive of conservatism than most social psychology academics. What Haidt seems to be supporting used to be known as the liberal society (free markets under a rule of law fostering spontaneity).

In college I read Marvin Harris and really enjoyed his ">http://www.amazon.com/Cannibals-Kings-Cultures-Marvin-Harris/dp/067972849X"> Cannibals and Kings: The Origins of Cultures. Whether true or not, I enjoyed his brand of Cultural Materialism in trying to figure out stuff like why certain cultures despise pig flesh (The Mideast) where others love pig flesh in their religious luau's (Polynesia). Ot trying to explain the early civilizations of Egypt/ China etc as hydraulic kingdoms, being driven by the need to control hugh flood plains susceptible to river systems thus requiring a hugh structure with ultimate power up top ordering mass workers to do hugh flood prevention engineering projects. That sort of thinking about cultures intrigued me.

But where I lost respect for that business was in reading stuff like Jared Diamomd's ">http://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Steel-Fates-Societies/dp/0393061310/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1297131803&sr=1-1"> Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies He seemed to me to be a guy who has a politically correct answer already constructed in his head before even beginning any research, after which he then illegitimately tries to shoehorn handpicked "facts" of cultural materialism into a narrative in order to justify the conclusion he cherishes. I found Diamond's agenda politically driven and disingenuous in the extreme, whereas I never felt that way about Marvin Harris at all.

There were sophist idlers hanging around the agora, competing with Socrates, in Plato's time as well. There was also a disdain for "practical" testing or application wrt hypotheses generated by "pure intellect" which rolled down the millenia until finding expression, once again, among the logical (or rational) positivists who arose during the Endarkenment and provided the fertile night soil in which Socialism/Marxism grew. Our tenured turnips, spouting their scientistic sophistry would have starved to death in Socrates time.

Hayek's alliance with Popper still furnishes our best hope for an escape to reality from the depredations of the credentialed morons.

The Muslim Brotherhood has dropped back out of negotiations, so the opposition remains totally fragmented as the clock ticks away towards the deadline for consitutional ammendments.

There is also this interesting bit:

do read the Time piece in full, as the author reports an ominous conversation with an army officer who insists that they will clear the streets if given the order to do so in the name of stability.

So convinded have our comentariate been that the Army was "on the fence" and would eventually have to "choose sides", that suddenly discovering that Army was always on the side of the government is "ominous."

Geeze. I've been touting Haidt for eons, especially when "research" purporting to prove that conservatives rely heavily on primitive brain functions issues forth from Berkeley every couple of years. Haidt has never shied away from assessing the differences between liberal and conservative thinking (as opposed to cognitive skills!), but whether I end up agreeing with him or not, he's one of the very few who sees fit to accord conservative values a decent respect.

Glad to see him getting some press at the New York Times, of all places!

I haven't had the talk yet with my kids: my 11 year old son and 6 year old daughter. I mean the one about global warming, about what's coming. But then, we grown-ups haven't had the talk yet among ourselves. Not really. We don't seem to know how,; the topic is apparently too big and scary. Or perhaps, for the uninformed (or misinformed), not scary enough.

There's hope reality will seep in the minds of the young, peter. When my youngest was going off to college, she took a look at the brochures about how green the school is and snarled: "I guess I should put a windmill in my backpack."

Diamond had some valid points in his books, and no one can really question them. Where he lost me is in extrapolating some of them well beyond the facts in evidence.

It is somewhat like some of the work being done now in, as an example, paleontology, where somehow we know the skin type and color and that the birds are all descendants of the dinosaurs instead of the reptiles. You can have a full fossil skeleton and somehow it's avian/mammal at a time when the nearest mammalian fossils are voles and lemmings.

Suddenly, some of the dinosaur drawings in NatGeo look like Carmen Miranda or Peter Allen technicolor Disney Tiki Hut audioanimatrons based upon exactly no scientific evidence.

There are known unknowns and unknown unknowns, and in many cases, we simply don't know shit, but today's scientific community is willing to come to conclusions with facts not in evidence.

Based on this logic, Optimus Prime and the Roswell aliens are perfectly logical.

but I was hugely offended by Obama's "opinion" that business should share the profits

(disclosure, my F key is hinky and so my typing will be super bad -- I have to super press the "F" key to make it work)

I read in the story about Sen. Kennedy's staffer indicted for stealing tax payer money that congressional staFFers are payed BONUSES!!

That is, people who work for people of congress are paid bonuses by their employer - tax paid congress people - and those congress people determine our tax dollars to pay them the bonus monies.

Senator Kennedy paid his staf on average 3 to 5 thousand bucks. (on top o their big time salary and health wavierd bene-ies)

I can't think of on another leader who would demonize small business other than Obama who sees the notion of business sharing the profit's of their investment as payout while taking taxpayer money to BONUS state workers!

In my profession, particular words mean particular things. When the book says I "SHOULD" or I "OUGHT" to do something, those are recommendations only and it remains within my discretion to comply or not comply. But when the book says I "MUST", then it is mandatory that I comply and there are no ifs, ands, or butts about it, and there will be repercussions if I don't comply.

So when I heard on the CBS Radio News today a report that Michelle Obama's spokesperson had said "restaurants MUST reduce their portions to help with the obesity problem in this country" it sent me off like a rocket. Who the hell are these people to tell private citizens and private companies what the hell they MUST do?

"We would encourage restaurants to help us" I can handle.
"We would hope restaurants would join together to assist us"
I can handle.
Almost any polite and humble request for just about anything I can handle.
But when haughty elites fling out the "Must" word without an ounce of "pretty please" beforehand, it viscerally hits me in the guts, and I suddenly can instantly understand why the crowds in Revolutionary Paris shouted so lustily at activities in The Place De La Revolution in 1793. Grrrrr!

Daddy: I agree 100%. I felt the same way last week when Obama kept saying Mubarak MUST do this or that. And when you see the menu for their Super Bowl party, it points up the hypocrisy of Michelle big time.

The bigotry of discrimination-fighting crowd is based on their mathematical illiteracy, IMO. They do not understand what “average” and “standard deviation” means.

It is perfectly established fact, that some groups have higher IQ, or higher sigma from average IQ, or significantly different interests in personal and professional career. Boys play with guns, girls play with dolls. Jews steady maintain sigma-like IQ advantage over surrounding population (so far). Women IQ is more tightly grouped than men, which means less female geniuses and less female idiots compared to men.

Does it mean that particular black female engineer interviewed for IP job is by default inferior? Absolutely not. She could be another Graham Bell. Does it mean that Ashkenazi male Jews will be vastly overrepresented in Science Nobel Prize recipients? Absolutely yes.

So what they are doing to correct this natural state of things? Give Nobel Peace Price to Obama and institute “equality of results” affirmative action.

I have another discrimination struggle to you guys. Pear trees grow much taller than apple trees.

You have to wonder what type of dreary, sad childhood these people who want to outlaw childhood had? One of my prized childhood possessions when I was 7 were my Hopalong Cassidy six shooters. We played cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians, dodge ball and tag and somehow, miraculously, by the time I was 13, hairstyles, makeup, nice clothes, school dances, and boys had taken over, and I waS no worse for wear for having been a complete Tom Boy in my preteen years. Squirt guns were for catching someone by surprise, getting them wet, and then laughing like crazy, just like they are today, only now they have those huge pump guns.

Though I think it should be the parents' decision, I can understand the idea that toy guns should not look identical to real guns, for the sake of police (or private citizens) who have to make split second life-and-death decisions.

Obviously this is a bigger concern in East St. Louis than in Grosse Pointe, which is a reason to leave these decisions to parents.

Suddenly, some of the dinosaur drawings in NatGeo look like Carmen Miranda or Peter Allen technicolor Disney Tiki Hut audioanimatrons based upon exactly no scientific evidence.

In my more conspiracy-minded moments, I swear there is a dinosaur "industry" and "they" need to keep coming up with new developments in how the dinosaurs looked and behaved, so that all new toys/films/TV shows/video games can be made and sold based on the "new evidence."